Cybersecurity may be the critical national security issue of the day. Ubiquitous connectivity, the cloud and a lack of general awareness combine to create a perfect storm that can threaten the very fabric of modern society. Few domains are as targeted - or as vulnerable - as government, the contractors who support it and national critical infrastructure. This blog offers observation and commentary on born of 20+ years experience in the government, defense and intelligence systems industry.

Monday, January 21, 2013

More Than a Better Mousetrap: The Data Core Behind Integrated Air Defense, Part I

In this three part series, I will be discussing the operational problem of integrated air defense from the perspective of its inherent cognitive, data and knowledge management processes, and the middleware tools that support and automate those processes.

Part One, published below, discusses the nature of the integrated air defense problem, introduces the associated cognitive processes and collates them within the knowledge management process.

Part Two, which will be published on Wednesday, 23 January 2013, discusses middleware tools applicable to integrated air defense systems and sets out a notional architecture for a middleware powered integrated air defense system.

Part Three, which will be published on Friday, 25 January 2013, discusses available middleware options, provides illustrations of real world integrated air defense systems and offers some concluding thoughts.

Recently,
the BBC published this article discussing Rheinmetall's 50kW
anti-aircraft laser. Fascinating, Star Wars kind of stuff. However,
what's more interesting is what the article DIDN'T say: Given the
capabilities of modern anti-aircraft gun and missile systems, the core of
anti-air warfare (AAW) is all about data, and the ability to rapidly and
efficiently process and derive meaning from that data.

I don't
BLAME the BBC. Laser technology captures the imagination. We can
all imagine a death ray burning through the air and downing a threatening
aircraft. Imagining the magic taking place inside a RAM chip is a bit
more difficult. That being said, the article's implied sensationalism is
a bit misleading. The ability to field an anti-aircraft artillery (AAA)
system that uses light to blast things is, while fascinating, not the core of
the modern air defense problem. The key challenge is (and always has been)
the rapid identification and classification of hostile aircraft and the timely
generation and execution of an appropriate air defense engagement solution.

Integrated Air Defense

Since the
early 1970s, AAA guns and missiles have been both accurate and lethal – just
take a look at the losses suffered by the Americans in Vietnam and the Israelis
during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. Not a lot has changed in the basic
concepts or technologies since then (although some of my missile friends might
take exception here). Improvements in weapon effectiveness over the last
forty years have really been in the realm of building a better mousetrap.

The real
action is in the realm of what is called “Integrated Air Defense Systems” or
IADS. IADS take real-time inputs - on a scale ranging from a few
hundred square meters to a national level - from a large number of distributed
sensors and correlate them against known AAA assets to arrive at tasking and
engagement decisions. These decisions are sent in real time to the relevant
shooters, who engage the targets, and report. At that point, the process
begins anew, with the IADS using the reporting data to assess and
retask. IADS is, for AAW, THE transformative
technology.

Think about
the fact that a Flanker-G (Su-30MKK) strike fighter has a maximum speed in
excess of 1,300 mph (2,100 kph). Now think about a dozen of them moving
that fast, coming in at different altitudes, from different directions over a
front spanning hundreds of miles or kilometers, going after different
targets. How do you determine which is the greatest threat, which one to
engage first or where to employ scarce AAW assets?

Conceptually,
the answer is simple: One or more sensors acquires the incoming aircraft,
a determination is made that the aircraft are hostile, information about the
expected route is calculated and passed to the shooters, who then engage and
destroy the hostile aircraft.

The problem
is that the simplicity is deceptive. There are multiple sensors, of
multiple types. They are sending huge volumes of data, constantly.
The data has a temporal dimension, and while it goes stale very rapidly,
historical data points are vitally important. The data must be acted upon
according to predefined rules governing the prioritization of targets by
threat, engagement permissions, which shooters engage which targets at which
times with what weapons, which command nodes receive what updates - and it must
be processed and acted upon RAPIDLY. The cognitive and computational
requirements are significant, requiring specialized software dedicated to processing
these tactical events in a manner reflective of complex cognitive activities.

The IADS Cognitive Puzzle

The exercise
of command and control requires interactions between three discrete cognitive
activities:Identifying the relevant
information from a deluge of sensory data, making sense of the information
within a given operational context and the application of organizational wisdom
(i.e., given a series of events, identify an optimal course of action).

In the IADS
context, each information object represents a real world event, and these
events trigger the series of cognitive activities.The first cognitive activity, identifying
relevant information, revolves around deriving situationalawareness (SA)
from a constantly, and rapidly, evolving environment.Rapid environmental evolutions comprise huge
numbers of discrete events.SA
derivation requires that each event be vetted against predefined filtering
rules that reflect organizational priorities in order to identify those that
are of interest.Due to the rapidity
with which SA information becomes stale, vetting and filtering activities must
be conducted in as close to real-time as possible.The vetting process creates a subset of
events that, collectively, yield SA.

Taken
individually, each event lacks context and meaning.For example, the fact that a Flanker-G was at
a given latitude, longitude and elevation at a given point in time may be
interesting, but it is also essentially meaningless.However, when taken in combination with other
events such as a number of positions/locations/altitudes over time and a
negative response to an identification friend or foe (IFF) interrogation, an operationally relevant meaning is
derived – in this case that a hostile aircraft is approaching your command and
control facility at 18,000 feet at a speed of 956 knots.

The cognitive process of deriving useful
contextual meaning from SA is referred to as “sensemaking” by the Command, Control, Communications, Computers,
Combat Systems and Intelligence (C5I) community.While SA informs about relevant events that
are taking place, sensemaking attaches an operational context and value to the
events through the use of operational business rules (e.g., “more than ten
aircraft of type A, moving at speed B, in direction C, at altitude D means
equates to a hostile penetration of national airspace”). The final
piece of the cognitive puzzle, the application of organizational wisdom,
naturally follows from sensemaking activities.Once we know what’s going on and why it matters, we use collective
experience to determine an optimal course of action.A simple example may be useful here:

a.Situational Awareness:There is an accident on the highway.

b.Sensemaking:Because there is an accident on the highway, traffic will be slow, and I
may be late to my meeting.

c.Wisdom Application:In order not to be late for my meeting, I will leave earlier and use
local streets.

Collectively,
this process is known as knowledge
management.Knowledge management
describes a sequence chain by which:

·DATA is collated to yield information;

·INFORMATION is contextualized to yield knowledge;

·KNOWLEDGE is used to inform wisdom;
and

·WISDOM is used to guide and optimize
behavior and courses of action.

Knowledge Management Pyramid

The knowledge
management process can also be readily applied to the IADS context:

a.Situational Awareness:There are ten Flanker-G aircraft heading toward a point on my coastline
that have failed IFF interrogation.

b.Sensemaking:Because these aircraft have failed IFF interrogation,they are likely hostile, and point on the
coastline that they are approaching contains two high value installations, my
regional air defense command and the airfield where most of my interceptors are
based.

II.Alert
Surface to Air Missile (SAM) and Anti-Aircraft Artillery (AAA) batteries within
the incursion zone;

III.Alert
tracking and acquisition radar units; and

IV. Notify my national command authority (NCA).

I hope you enjoyed Part I of this series, and found it informative. Please come back for Part II on Wednesday, 23 January 2013, in which I will be discussing middleware
tools applicable to integrated air defense systems and setting out a
notional architecture for a middleware powered integrated air defense
system.

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About Me

I'm a cyber and systems engineering professional with more than twenty years experience designing (and using) military, intelligence,
security and national senior leadership decision support systems, and
have worked across domains ranging from naval mine warfare to combat
engineer command and control to amphibious warfare, strike warfare and
unmanned systems. Professionally, my goals are to ensure that the organizations of which I am part contribute to an improved cybersecurity posture for the US
government, its contractors and the national critical infrastructure. My goal is to help both government and private sector organizations revolutionize the way they build and acquire
and protect their systems and data.

The views expressed on this blog are my own.

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